The author loves these characters and this community. She makes each of them real, and I cared about them in a way that’s uncommon when I read fiction.

Problem is that there are too many of them, and because of it, the story wandered too much for me. There were two competing narratives here, but together they are only about 60% of the book. The rest is digressions, and your enjoyment of the book hinges on whether you feel they make the story richer or pull focus from the main things.

I fell into the second camp, and by the last 100 pages was getting frustrated when a chapter started, clearly centred on a side character.

With more room to breathe, maybe this would have worked better. But to me it seemed that the two main storylines lost momentum, and the whole thing felt a little diminished as a result.